Francis Obinor
Guardian Book Review of A Carnival of Idiots
August 2000

A Gathering Wind of Despair

Carnival of Looters, Tayo Olafioye's second book on poetry dialogues with the native society - all those he left behind in his beleaguered country. The collection creates a pattern of remembrance which is littered with anger and hope on the one hand and, on the other hand, a sense of pity for those who engage in the wanton plunder of his homeland and country, Nigeria.

Having emigrated to the United States of America in the late 1980s, the poet as a concerned citizen and patriot in fits if anger ponders on what had ravished his home country to a state of paralysis.

Citing African-American writer, James Baldwin's statement that to love one's country is to be critical about its hateful history, its unwholeness, the poet seeks to balance 'love' and 'hate' - the recurring themes in his collection - for a better Nigerian society. Thus, life paradox exists to check and maintain a balance in man's very existence.

As a patriot also, he strives for a better nation with justice, transparency, accountability, fairness, equity and sense of belonging to remedy the obvious imbalance of the contemporary Nigerian society.

Olafioye's kind of poetry is not only effusive but heart-rendering by deeds which belittle and denigrate humanity. This kind of collection is rooted in Pablo Neruda's poetry of imperfection where a poetry is impure as the clothing, like human bodies, soup stained soiled and shameful behaviour, human wrinkles, weird, vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, shock of encounter, political loyalties, denials, doubts, infirmation as well as taxes.

Olafioye's collection is replete with recurrent features of the above themes far beyond the areas of politics and culture.

A picture of a man's inquest to conquer the turbulence of his world is created in the Looters, "The pathology of hope," "When is a nation," "The million naira march," "Parliament of idiots," "The aborted elections," "NFA: no future association" and, "Mandela berates Nigeria."

The poet vividly reveals the harsh reality of the morbid face of the Nigerian nation and life at its starkest form.

For example in "The vision of crazy looters," the tone is harsh in part, quick and witty with vibrant tempo. But the anguish expressed is lyrical and well laced with elaborate satirical bites.

In "Another spring of meaning," Olafioye takes the position of a father imbued with the tenderness of care and love for humanity.

He uses the poem "To my daughter Anna" to exemplify the undying love for his country.

The poet displays with descriptive skill, his closeness to Neruda's state of imperfection in "My patriotic quest"; "The dialogue of hope"; "Martyrdom"; "Ken Saro-Wiwa"; "Missions abroad" and "Oh world: we thank you."

According to Onookome Okome in his foreword, 0lafioye's "My patriotic quest" is "significant in many ways as it foregrounds the debate of nationhood and nationality in a plural society on the verge of disintegration."

He says central to the debate generated in the poem is "the need to question and relocate the nation in this turbulent times."

In the second part, the poet's answer to the multifarious problems plaguing the country lies in the nostalgic response to and longing for the comfort provided by the discourse of ancestral world.

The theme of nationhood and the question which it has generated in post-war, post oil-boom Nigeria is what Olafioye is asking repeatedly. He tasks the rulers whom he refers to as "the looters" and says the continued silence of Nigerians without addressing the issue of corruption and looting will eventually lead them to their graves as well as the death of Nigeria as a nation.

Thus his "pathology of hope rejects the vacant notion of nation building since death has no assignment in a deserted home."

Olafioye's poem "When is a nation" according to Okome, is not left to float aimlessly in its intellectual orbit. Rather, it is concretised by the poet's reduction of its essence to bare human existence.

In "Martyrdom" he extols the worth of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Ogoni Environmentalist and Civil Rights' activist hanged on November 10, 1995 by the Abacha regime.

Describing the death as shocking, he, says: "In you Ken lived the muse/language lost one of its alphabets/that dead day in our November."

To Olafioye, Ken Saro-Wiwa is a symbol of the dissenting majority of Nigerians; an embodiment of the question "when is a nation?"

In "Missions abroad," the poet looks into the fruitless trips abroad by government officials during the dark days of Nigeria to launder the battered image of the country and says only honest, decent and honourable leaders and deeds can rejuvenate the image of Nigeria instead of the huge amount of funds being expended.

Riding on major themes like nationhood and citizenship, the poet laments the height of looting, stealing and corruption. Moved with passion and love for his country, he longs for a glorious past when things were good and people, God-fearing.

He stresses that no one is excepted from the heinous deeds, and adds that the only hope of redemption for posterity lies in the quick correction of the blinding realities of Nigeria's post independence social and political madness.

No doubt a creative piece, the figures of speech - imagery, simile, metaphor, personification, pun among others are amply used to create dialogue and images for understanding even though some of the poems appear complex in context and structure.